Abstract:

The junior high school represents the weakest sector of the education system in Italy and perhaps in other countries. This is partly due to the lack of specific teacher training during academic studies, contrary to what happens in primary school. In most cases, science teachers have a master's degree in biology or mathematics and must teach both physical and natural sciences. During their university studies, they usually do not receive specific training in physics, either in terms of content or teaching methodology. Consequently, teachers, perceiving the weakness of their training, tend to avoid addressing important aspects of physics in their lessons and do not adopt more stimulating approaches than a traditional frontal lesson.

Additionally, students aged 11-13 are experiencing a time of making choices that will affect the rest of their lives. Thus, offering them the opportunity to discover the beauty and importance of science, permeating every aspect of daily life, can have an even stronger social impact than activities dedicated to high school students, usually focusing on more advanced topics in modern physics.

Finally, most schools have very limited laboratory equipment in their science classrooms, rarely used for experimental STEM learning. For this reason, as researchers occasionally called to collaborate with individual schools, a few years ago we decided to collect our experiences and transform this limit into an opportunity, designing experimental activities that can be carried out in any context - even in the absence of a laboratory, using inexpensive materials that can be found at home by any student, but that have the potential to let students discover how science enters every aspect of daily life.

In autumn 2017, the first edition of the INFN "AggiornaMenti" program started in Turin, a course on the cooperative "learning-by-doing" approach to science teaching dedicated to secondary school teachers. After the first edition, AggiornaMenti has become a national project supported by the INFN outreach commission which currently involves 10 local sections of the institute throughout Italy. Every year, even during the pandemic in which the activity was carried out mainly in online format, about 100 science teachers attended our training course, which includes practical activities that cover every aspect of classical physics: mechanics, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, acoustics, optics, electromagnetism ... When possible, experiences are proposed that show the connections of physics with the life and earth sciences. From 2021 the project also proposes an online coding school on Scratch and Arduino proposed by the INFN-Ferrara section (about 30 participants /year). Our hands-on approach to science learning, based on practical activities carried out in small groups, is suitable for enhancing a wider range of skills than a traditional frontal lesson and this has led some of the participating teachers to partially change the assessment criteria of their students. In addition to making students discover new skills, this blending of skills is also what is needed in any scientific collaboration. This talk will present the INFN "AggiornaMenti" program dedicated to the training of secondary school teachers, also showing the results of a feedback survey among the participants in past editions of the project.

Keywords:

Junior high school, teacher training, learning by doing, practical activities, low-cost material, physics teaching.